nostalgia: being and time
by Dorian Gray
Summary: And when he lies next to her, skin to skin, he feels her surround him like a gray fog that rolls out of reach every time he moves forward, but follows whenever he tries to walk away. MSR.


Standard Disclaimer: X-files © Chris Carter, Fox Network, et al. No Profit.

Author: Dorian Gray

Rating: PG-13 (sexuality)

Spoilers: None. Oblique reference to 'Never Again.'

AN: Set in the later seasons. Mulder POV. "Whoso list . . .", Wyatt.

Summary: And when he lies next to her, skin to skin, he feels her surround him like a gray fog that rolls out of reach every time he moves forward, but follows whenever he tries to walk away.

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nostalgia: being and time

in ten moments

by dorian gray

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whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind . . .

**I**

Even now he remembers the first reason he tried to touch her. He sometimes wonders what has changed.

**II**

He spends hours kissing her. He likes to imagine he can suck her spirit out from between her lips and hold her, amorphous and shimmering, inside his lungs -- but he knows she gives him nothing but air. He is disappointed and cannot understand why.

She would give him her last breath. He knows this.

**III**

In the thinnest hours of the night between the rhythm of their syncopated heartbeats, he believes she is the house of his being and, in his whispery thoughts, calls her home, knowing that home is the one place he can never return to.

And when he lies next to her, skin to skin, he feels her surround him like a gray fog that rolls out of reach whenever he moves forward, but follows every time he tries to walk away. Even when he kisses her, pressing her into the bed with his body, pushing everything he can inside her, he still finds himself wishing it were possible for him to touch her. Maybe that is why he calls her home, he thinks as he brushes a strand of hair from her face in the pale light of morning.

**IV**

He spends hours skimming just the tips of his fingers over her face while she's sleeping, touches so insubstantial he does not wake her despite the sensitivity she's developed to him over time.

Maybe he's been touching her all long, only he has grown too numb to feel it.

He wonders if he hurts her. But he does not ask and he tells himself it is because she would never answer.

But he wonders sometimes if he cannot hear her.

He fears her silence.

**V**

He loves her and he loves the truth, but they are objects at such different distances on such different scales, he can never get them both in focus at the same time. So he promises himself he would never abandon her as he walks out on her time and again. Promises to always be there for her, even as he paints her over with a thin layer of invisibility against the days when she is the only thing he wants to look at. He wishes his existence were a function of probability, so he could be both present and absent. He wishes he no longer occupied a life of hovering projection, partly in the past, partly in the future, but never precisely where he wants to be.

If he stops throwing himself forward with questions, he would cease to exist. He is sure of this. And if he lets go of the past, he will not have the strength to ask those questions. Memory drives him forward like an avalanche even as it disappears in his hands like a curl of gray smoke or the taste of her on his tongue.

**VI**

He knows he cannot be at peace. Not yet. So he feels tomorrows shifting directly into yesterdays. 'Will-be's become 'might-have-been's. The past swallows the future like a snake eating its own tail.

She is not happy. He knows this.

He reaches out to her with empty hands that remain empty and do not reach her.

**VII**

He does not think about the whys -- why he loves her; why it is not enough; why she grows more and more like a stranger to him; why he understands her on an instinctual level less than one day a week; why he counts himself lucky to grasp even her mind seven days out of a month when once he could pluck through her thoughts as though they were his own; why it has been years since he knew anything about the inner life she paints on the back of her eyelids.

He can't remember when he lost everything of hers except the keys to the front door of her apartment and those two dozen steps that lead into her bedroom.

Sometimes he wishes he'd never slept with her.

Then he slips into her bed, unwilling to lose even that tenuous connection.

**VIII**

He wonders if she misses him even when he's next to her. Wonders if he's torn a hole inside her that no amount of sex can fill. Does she have stray thoughts that begin with 'I want' and then cast out blindly in his direction? Does her need ache?

He wonders if her sensation of lack festers like his.

He reaches out to her. His hands remain empty.

He wonders what he's doing wrong.

**IX**

The light of morning is still a thin pearly gray when he slides from her warm bed. The shower washes away the rest of her. He is already packed.

Silent, he kisses her one last time and then holds his breath, wanting to believe there is something -- anything -- more than air expanding him from the inside out.

He leaves without saying goodbye. As he places the front door between them, he knows with a calm detachment that today will never be the last time. He wishes this assurance of a future would pour over him like love, soothing the sore and empty places.

It does not. All he feels is cold.

He wishes he were either less selfish or more.

**X**

He feels the fog of her closing in behind him as he walks away.

Days later he is still driving, still drawing out the distance between them. He sees everything slip by behind a layer of glass.

She is always before him and behind him now; where he has left, where he hopes to be going, but no longer beside him.

He thinks of her as home.

It is an easy thing to roll down the car window in a humming smooth slide. Reaching out, he tries to catch the breeze with his fingertips.

'Noli me tangere,' for Ceasar's I am

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.


End file.
